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UMD Sales Top 100K

Posted by Zonk on from the bully-for-them dept.

GamesIndustry.biz has the news that Sony has sold more than 100,000 units of UMD movies to date. This does not include the Spider-Man 2 discs that were included with the PSP package in the U.S. From the article: "Sony's film canon is broadening all the time, the executive said, with releases aimed at demographics outside the traditional 18-25 year-old male gamer demographic expected soon - including releases targeted at women, and cartoons."

4 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Movies by turtled · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It would be nice for PSP to have video out so you can watch these movies on a larger screen, shared with people. I don't see spending $20 for the DVD, then $20 to have a single person version. Heh, UNIVERSAL Media Disc.

    --
    "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
    1. Re:Movies by turtled · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What I don't understand is why they were $30 in the first place, and why they are $20 now. They should be less than $10 for the quality of video, lack of extras, and viewable only on a small screen. If the PS3 has UMD reader, it will still be crappy video on a TV, after touting it's dual HD display output capabiliy.

      --
      "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
  2. Re:Questionable demographic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Maybe they are counting sales to Gabe and Tycho?

  3. Does this seem like a big failure to anyone else? by alvinrod · · Score: 2, Insightful
    According to this article the PSP sold 500,000 units in the first 2 days. I'm sure it's gone on to sell millions of units by now.

    This means that only around 5% or so of the customer base is actually buying UMD movies (and that's assuming that each person only bought one movie). Doesn't this normally constitute a huge failure? Yet the Sony PR company will probably use this to proclaim the sucess of the PSP and UMD.

    The results aren't surprising to me considering the serious limitations of the format: same price as a DVD for lower quality and the inablity to be used on anything else but a PSP. Sure it's a nice feature, but it would seem as though a majority of the people really don't care.

    Although it would be a lot harder from a technical standpoint, why not create some extra hardware that would allow the PSP to play DVDs? Given Sony's history of building a console and then adding in the neat features later (PS2 HD, Network Card, Multi-tap) they could've made even more money selling people the extra hardware. To me, UMD movies just never made much sense from any point of view.